Short Takes On The News: Public Defenders, Lawyer Ideology, and Faculty Pay

The Governor of Maine is promoting legislation that would revise how representation for indigent criminal defendants is organized in that state. Rather than organizing a public entity to perform the work, the State would contract with lawyers for individual cases. The story in the Bangor Daily News doesn’t mention this directly, but this would likely save a cat box load of money that would go to government pensions for state employed Public Defenders otherwise. I wonder if Maine would be willing to try this same approach with the Prosecutor’s Office. Probably not.

Has anyone ever wondered about the political ideology of the legal academy? I’d say the answer is no only because the bias anecdotally appears to be liberal. Well, someone took the time and effort to measure that bias in multiple contexts. A new paper called The Political Ideologies of the American Lawyer by Adam Bonica, Adam S. Chilton, and Maya Sen seems to confirm just where that bias lines up on a spectrum of left and right. The legal profession collectively lines up somewhere center left close to where Bill Clinton would be (he’s a marker on the chart along with other well-known politicians). Medical doctors and bankers tend to be more to the right. Go figure.

Graduates of elite law schools tend to be more liberal:

The most striking result in Figure 6 is that all 14 top law schools have distributions that lean to the left. That is, there are more liberal alumni from those schools than there are conservative alumni. Not only do all of the schools lean to the left, the skew is fairly extreme in several of the schools. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the University of California, Berkeley has the most liberal leaning distribution of alumni of all the elite law schools. That said, although the ideology of Berkeley graduates skews the furthest to the left, it is obviously not the only school with a heavily left skewed distribution. In fact, all of the top six law schools—Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, Chicago, and NYU—have a relatively small number of graduates with conservative CFscores.

There’s a joke in there somewhere but I’m not the one who is going to make it.

There is an in depth write-up of the paper in Quartz. It can be downloaded here.

Finally, the EEOC has investigated pay discrepancies between male and female faculty members at the University of Denver and wouldn’t you know it, there is a pay gap. Moreover, it’s been going on for at least four decades. The story is in the Chronicle of Higher Education and the Denver Post. I guess liberality stops at the paymaster window, at least at UD.

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Just in case you don't get it: The views expressed are solely those of the blog post author and should not be attributed to anyone else, meaning they do not necessarily represent the views of any organization that the post author is affiliated with or with the views of any other author who publishes on this blog.